ft.com/techblog

Ribbit, which introduced itself only last December as Silicon Valley’s first phone company, has been bought by one of the world’s oldest phone companies for $105m.

BT, the UK operator which began as a telegraphic service in 1868, aims to use Ribbit as a platform for services on the national Internet-Protocol 21st century network it has been building, called 21CN.

In an interview with us this morning, JP Rangaswami, managing director of service design at BT, made reference to two other Silicon Valley telecoms platforms - the Apple iPhone and Google’s Android project.

“We could have built a device-specific platform like Apple did, we could have built a platform for creating ads - Google might call it Android but I guess we think it should be spelt Ad-droid - or we could have been like AT&T and just provided the pipes for these people to work from,” he said.

“But we felt telephony and software were now one and the same thing, and we wanted to be with people who had that same vision that it was going to be a converged world.”

So BT’s argument is that it is a more open platform, not tied to use on just the iPhone and not part of some Trojan horse for Google to sell more ads.

The problem is that Ribbit may now be perceived to be tied to one carrier and one country even, rather than being seen as a global platform open to all.

And while BT is a big company, it does not have the pulling power of Apple’s iconic device nor of a Google to persuade developers to flock to it in droves.

It may be happy enough anyway folding Ribbit into the software and services it is planning to sell businesses on its IP network, but Ribbit itself insisted today it was retaining its autonomy and would be allowed to partner with others.

Ted Griggs, chief executive, told me Ribbit had realised it needed access to a global network to grow and BT gave it immediate access to 178 countries.

“We’ve established a lot of different relationships in the enterprise and with other carriers,” he said.

“We feel BT will benefit because they want to push the software side of the business, we’ll continue to establish partnerships and BT is encouraging us to do so.”

Ribbit’s key technology is a “SmartSwitch” that handles the complexities of mobile, fixed and internet telephony, allowing developers to master just a few simple commands to bring voice to any web page or web application.

It remains to be seen how Ribbit’s 5,000 developers will react to news of its acquisition. In a blog note today to them, Ribbit said it would mean more features such as text messaging and call flow management.

July 29th, 2008 in Software | Permalink